(a) Field of the Invention
The current invention relates to an automatic soundtrack generation device that operates to merge a sound track that is independent of an external sound source, while recording or playing back a video sequence.
(b) Description of Related Art
Various devices capable of recording or playing video recordings have already been developed, such as digital or analog camcorders and other video recorders. These devices can possess one or several audio inputs which permit mixing or replacement of the sound track that was recorded originally during the recording of the image with an external audio source.
Furthermore, there also exist various devices that are capable of playing recorded pieces, such as digital compact disc players, players of compressed files (for instance as per the MPEG-level 3 standard), etc.
Finally, there exist devices that are based on synthesizers of instrumental sounds on which are applied, for instance as per the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard, xe2x80x9cscoresxe2x80x9d of notes that are composed automatically.
The present invention represents an improvement of prior art devices by integrating in a video recorder or player a module that generates music or other sounds which either can be mixed with the originally recorded sound (sound mixing), or can replace the originally recorded sound (sound dubbing). This sound mixing or dubbing can be performed either at video/audio record time or at play time (FIG. 1).
The invention disclosed herein envisions selection of musical pieces either out of a library stored, for instance, in the form of digitized musical files (e.g., MP3 or CD music files, etc.), of MIDI files or other types of files; or from pieces that are composed in a pseudo-random fashion using, for instance, the synthesizer function to play original musical pieces.
The invention further envisions selection of musical pieces according to a specified musical style, in a pseudo-random fashion, or according to predefined criteria, wherein the audio files meet the predefined criteria and are either extracted from a music library or are generated by an automatic composition function. The resulting sounds are used either during the video recording or during the video playback.